Web Hosting Blog :: Ubiquity Hosting Solutions

We frequently get phone calls asking what platform is best for a site.  Does it make sense to host your site on shared hosting, a VPS, or a dedicated server?  Well, the answer is yes.  They all make sense, but you need to find the right fit.  Last week we gave an overview of your options and then reviewed shared hosting as an option and weighed the pros and cons.  This week we’ll cover another option, VPS (Virtual Private Server).

Virtual Private Server

Using our analogy from last week, if a dedicated server is a house, a VPS is an apartment, and shared hosting is a room full of bunks.  A VPS is a general term for a virtual machine.  In laymen terms, it’s taking a big resource (a dedicated server), and using software to break it into several pretend machines.  It’s like taking a big office space, putting up cubical walls, and calling all of the new space offices.  They look and feel like offices, but lets face it – we all know they’re just cubicles…you can hear the buzz of the rest of the office moving around, you don’t have 100% privacy, and you’re all breathing the same air.

A VPS is an extra degree of separation from other users when compared to shared hosting.  The example we used last week, a while(1) loop in another customer’s code, won’t break your site on a VPS.  The downside is that sometimes they’re too small for their own good.  A VPS with 512mb of memory actually burns up a significant amount of that memory running the OS and cPanel (the control panel running your site).  So it’s possible, on a technical level, for your site to perform worse on a VPS than on shared hosting if you don’t purchase the right VPS.  Don’t be afraid of doing that if you talk to our sales department – we’re excellent coaches when it comes to helping you pick which hosting plan is right for you.

Something else worth mentioning is that unlike shared hosting, you can pick your software versions.  What to use a slightly dated version of Apache because a new version dropped a feature?  Sure, we can manage that.  Want to hold off up upgrading ruby on rails? No problem.

Pros: cheaper than dedicated server, private, can change software versions, can reboot at free will

Cons: it’s easy to buy one that’s too small, still not 100% independent from other customers, low resources mean some things like ffmpeg can be sluggish at best

We frequently get phone calls asking what platform is best for a site.  Does it make sense to host your site on shared hosting, a VPS, or a dedicated server?  Well, the answer is yes.  They all make sense, but you need to find the right fit.

What makes sense for my site?

Let’s start by giving you an idea of what you’re getting into.  It helps that the names are nothing more than descriptions of what each hosting plan is.  Shared hosting is exactly that – it’s a lot of customers sharing a server.  A VPS is a virtual private server – it’s a virtualized server that adds a degree of privacy from shared hosting but isn’t quite a dedicated server.  A dedicated server is, as the name would suggest, a server dedicated to you.

I love analogies so lets throw one of those in.  If a dedicated server is like a house, then a VPS would be an apartment in an apartment building, and shared hosting would be a bunch of bunks in a single room.  That analogy carries pretty well, lets look at it a little more in depth over our next few blog posts.

Shared Hosting

If someone in a room full of bunks gets sick, you’re quite likely to get sick because you’re in such close quarters.  Similarly, if a rogue site gets stuck in a while(1) loop and it’s on the same shared hosting server as yours, it can take your site down temporarily.  It’s just the nature of what you’re buying, it’s susceptible to problems caused by other people because there are no rigid barriers between you and other customers.  That said, it’s a very economical option and it’s great for most sites.

On shared hosting, we don’t update software versions unless it’s a security update.  We’re often asked why and the answer is pretty straightforward – if we make an update from Apache 1.6 to Apache 2.0 or PHP4 to PHP5, it can break a lot of sites.  We’ll always do security updates, but we don’t always do functionality updates.  It’s not because we don’t want to, it’s because we need to keep the environment as stable and consistent as possible.  Ubiquity Hosting possesses the technology to circumvent this problem on a regular basis -  we can let you pick your software version for a lot of software, but we can’t always do it.

Pros: Inexpensive, adequate for most sites, cheap to maintain.

Cons: Can go down when it’s not your fault, not great for a large site, limited permission levels, can’t update all software

Check out next week’s post for information about VPS servers and dedicated servers.